Chapter 41
Saturday morning dawned with clear skies and steadily warming temperatures. Jojo shoved her ski jacket farther back in the closet and reverted to her normal winter coat.
She had time this morning for coffee and some bread and butter—toast required a toaster … which required electricity—with her uncles before she went into town to meet Conor.
One of the first things Jojo had noticed about Uncle Levi when she came back to Somerset County in February was that his dementia had given him sundowner’s syndrome—a cluster of symptoms like increased confusion, agitation, anxiety and mood swings that worsened in people with dementia and Alzheimer’s as evening approached and darkness fell.
His symptoms weren’t just related to sundown, though.
The weather affected him the same way. His mood was bright and cheery on a sunshiny day and dour and despairing on a rainy day.
And this morning the smile on Uncle Levi’s face when she came into the kitchen was warm enough to melt the frost off a windowpane.
“You see the sun come up this morning?” he asked, sounding as excited as a little kid. He didn’t wait for her response. “My goodness, if you could put that sunrise in a box, you could sell it.”
Uncle Jonas came into the kitchen as Uncle Levi continued. “And if somebody offered you a hundred dollars for it, you wouldn’t have to give ’em back change.”
“Selling sunrises again are you, Levi?” Uncle Jonas inquired as he poured coffee into a mug. “’Cause if I read the Good Book right, them sunrises belong to God, and he might not like you making a profit off them.”
Uncle Levi laughed merrily. Jojo loved the sound of his laugh. It was like Ali’s laugh—warm and real and inclusive, inviting the rest of the world to join in.
“Aw, we figured God’d probably look the other way, if we didn’t make a habit of it,” Uncle Levi added.
“We who?” Jojo asked.
“Me and Liam.”
Jojo’s breath caught in her throat. She was so shocked she just stared at her uncle in disbelief.
Jojo had to get out of the kitchen. She couldn’t do this. She began to scoot her chair out from the table, her eyes wide, breathing shallow.
“That boy ain’t here, Levi. He’s gone on to be with the Lord. And you hadn’t ought to be talking about him like he was alive. He’s passed over. Ask Jojo. She’s the one found him.”
She shook her head silently no, tried to speak, but the air had been so kicked out of her she didn’t have enough left for sound.
Uncle Levi went from certain to confused, and Uncle Jonas was determined to make him understand. “She was just a little girl, you remember, and she went to the meeting house, and he was there. Tell him Jojo.”
Tell Uncle Levi about finding her brother dead?
Say the words out loud?
She had never said them out loud, not ever. She had secretly believed her whole life that if she ever tried to tell anyone what she found, her voice would be silenced like it was before. And this time, she would never speak again.
Jojo turned and stumbled toward the kitchen door, heard Uncle Jonas ask what was wrong, but she didn’t stop to tell him.
She couldn’t tell him, or anybody else, what she’d seen that day.
And she couldn’t stay in the room with a crazy old man who thought he had milked cows this morning with her dead brother.
She didn’t go back to her room, just grabbed her coat, called to Trident, and hurried out to her truck.
Then she drove around for half an hour with the window on her truck down, relishing the cold air on her face, so that by the time she met Conor at the barracks she was ready to go with him to the home of Jessica Blackburn, the widow of David Blackburn, who had been shot by the sniper.
Jojo had never met David Blackburn. In the photos and videos amassed by the FBI, Jojo had noted that although Blackburn was among the first people loaded into seats on the ski lift that night, he had not been wearing skis.
Unless he intended to ride a sled down the slope, he’d be going to the top, turning around and coming right back down—like the Amish. Perhaps he couldn’t ski.
She’d intended to ask his widow about that, but one look at the woman who answered the door after Conor’s knock made it plain she needed to stick to essential questions. Mrs. Blackburn was not up for small talk. At a little after nine in the morning, she was already drunk.
Jessica Blackburn made no effort to hide it. She had a half-empty bottle of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Come on in and sit down. I’m glad to talk to you about my Davey.”
Her living room looked like a Category 5 hurricane had recently blown through. Couch and chair cushions were scattered everywhere, lampshades had been knocked off lamps, drawers had been pulled out and the contents emptied on the floor.
Jessica waved the wine bottle dismissively at the mess. “I been looking for my locket,” she said, keeping her voice level with an effort. “It’s the locket Davey gave me. I lost Davey. Then I lost the locket … and now … I’m losing my mind.”
She collapsed on the cushionless couch, let the wine bottle slide out of her fingers to the floor, buried her face in her hands, and began to cry great gut-wrenching sobs.
Jojo sat down beside her and put her arm around her shoulders. “I’m very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Blackburn.”
“Loss? Loss? It’s all gone, there’s nothing left without David.”
“We don’t want to trouble you unnecessarily, Mrs. Blackburn,” Conor said, trying to get to the reason they’d come. “We believe that the person who shot?—”
“Person? It wasn’t a person. It was a devil in a human being suit. Only a devil would have shot my Davey who never hurt anybody.”
“We suspect that the person who committed these crimes had only one intended victim and shot the other people to cover that up.”
Her head snapped up. “Only wanted to kill one person and shot the others …?”
“We don’t know that to be a fact,” Jojo said. “But it’s our working theory right now and that’s what brings us to you. Is there anyone in your husband’s life who would have a motive to kill him?”
The woman leapt up so abruptly she kicked over the wine bottle on the floor and wine splashed out on the carpet. She put the cigarette to her lips with trembling fingers, inhaled deeply and let the smoke trail out of her nose and mouth.
“Nobody would want to kill Davey. He was the perfect husband. He wanted to live in Florida, but when I wanted to stay in the Highlands, he stayed with me. He loved me so much he gave up where he wanted to live for me.”
She began to pace drunkenly, dribbling ashes on the floor as she walked.
“That man got up every morning thinking about me. Every morning, he’d say, ‘How can I make your day better, Jessie Bird?’ That’s what he called me, his little Jessie Bird.
” She turned around with an anguished look on her face.
“And I didn’t appreciate it. I didn’t tell him often enough how much I loved him.
” She sat back down on the couch. Or her legs collapsed out from under her, it was impossible to tell the difference.
“So you were telling us that you don’t know of anyone who had a motive to kill your husband. Is that correct?”
“You know what we were going to do? We were going to go on a cruise. Davey liked hot weather. I liked cold and snow. And so he stayed here with all the snow. He couldn’t ski like everybody else, but he stayed for me.”
Conor and Jojo exchanged a this-is-pointless look.
“You obviously don’t have any information to give us,” Conor said and got to his feet. “Thank you for your time.”
Jessica Blackburn looked at him miserably. “What am I supposed to do now?” And she started to cry again.
When Jojo stood up to join Conor, she glanced through the open door into the kitchen and saw Martha Byler, an Amish woman who’d made quilts with her mother and aunts when she was a little girl.
She knew Martha earned extra money for her family cooking and cleaning house for the English.
How would she ever be able to clean up this mess?
Conor turned and started for the door, leaving Jessica Blackburn sitting on the couch, her head in her hands sobbing.
Jojo stepped quickly into the kitchen, squeezed Martha Byler’s hand and said quietly, “You got your work cut out for you.”
Martha gave her a thin-lipped smile, then leaned closer. “That woman thinks her husband was madly in love with her …” She made a humph sound in her throat. “But I know better.”
Jojo’s eyes widened. “What is it you know?”
“Poor woman drinks so much, or she’d have seen it a long time ago.
I do their laundry. I’ve smelled the perfume on his shirts.
I can do the math on when he was supposed to be home and when he actually shows up.
He’s been running around on her for months and she thinks he hung the moon.
” Martha Byler shook her head. “When you live your life without any kind of moral compass, this is how you end up.”
Jojo’s mind was reeling. If David Blackburn was having an affair, that opened up all kinds of possible motives for murder.
His wife clearly couldn’t be the killer.
She’d have fallen off the chalet roof and broken her neck.
But what if the other woman was married?
Maybe her husband … By the time she slid into the seat beside Conor, she knew where to start looking.
“We need to go to Mattingly’s Funeral Home,” she said.
“Where David Blackburn was laid out? Why?”
“To find out who was sobbing in the parking lot.”